The Most Dangerous Thing by Laura Lippman

Synopsis From Back Cover:

Years ago, they were all the best of friends.  But as time passed and circumstances changed, they grew apart, became adults with families of their own, and began to forget about the past - and terrible lie they all shared.  But now Gordon ("Go-Go"), the youngest and wildest of the five, has died unexpectedly and the other four have come together for the first time in years.  Suddenly each of these old friends has to wonder if the dark secret they've shared for so long is the reason for their troubles today... and if someone within the circle is trying to destroy them all.

Monday, April 1st, 2012 and Friday, September 18th, 2009 will always be connected in my brain.  Believe me, it's not a good connection.  One of the most agonizing things to have happen as a book blogger is to agree to a review and then not be able to finish a book.

I've had books that I really didn't connect with, but still be able to find something about it to get me to keep reading.  I've even had one book that I hated more than anything else in my life, but the anger I had towards it compelled me to finish it.  It's a horrible feeling to have a book that you expected to like, agree to review, and then have this kind of experience with it.  Part of me feels like I'm letting someone down, but I guess the show must go on.

I guess in hindsight I should have know better.  Back in September of 2010 I reviewed another Lippman book and pretty much had the same reaction to it.  I just wish I would have refreshed my memory by reading that review first.  I had the same problem with both books.  I think the writing is technically flawless, the story lines are interesting, and the characters are supposed to be dynamic.  With all that I still can't, for whatever reason, connect with anything that I'm reading.  It's as if the character sketches and plot points were plugged into a computer and pages of a meticulously written story were spit out.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that, for me, there is no emotional connection behind anything I'm reading.  It's just a little too cold and sterile for me.

I tried to force myself to feel something, anything that would keep me reading.  I just wanted some little crumble of emotion to grab onto.  I kept trying and trying, then I had to face the truth.  For whatever reason, Laura Lippman's writing is just not for me.  I can't force myself to like something, so I gave up on page 122. I feel bad for it, but my brain and eyes feel just a bit better.

I would like to thank Trish of TLC Book Tours for the opportunity to read and review this book.  Please visit the tour page for other reviews.

Jessica Alba Hollywood Actress

Kathy Bates on Two and a Half Men

Charlie's Devil

Two And A Half Men with out Charlie Sheen seems to be a show in search of a Charlie Sheen or at least a "Charlie Harper."

The show has had its ups (Darma and Greg) and downs since Charlie Sheen left the show.

The writer's show that they write much better for Sheen than Kutcher as not even a year after Sheen's departure they bring back Charlie Harper.

Kathy Bates comes in and plays a Harper now in hell as a woman.

Both the writers and Bates excel.

Bates has the diction, speech pattern  and "Charlie" down pat. She get's an A plus plus.

The writers however get an A minus minus.

Don't get me wrong bringing back "Charlie Harper" was a great move.
However being that they brought back the character in the middle of the season instead of  making that the season premiere for next year shows how desperate CBS must be.

The other reason for the minus minus is because the writers have failed to give Ashton Kutcher's "Walden" character lines or a story half as interesting as Charlie Harper.

What happens next? we all have to stay tuned.

David Pena Talk Boogie Night's On The Music and Entertainment Report

BLAME IT ON THE BOOGIE!

Today we have David Pena discussing the grand re opening of Boogie Night's This Weekend at The Tropicana!

(The Music And Entertainment Report WILL BE AT THE RED CARPET OPENING!)

Tune in tonight at 6pm
1360 AM WNJC
|Listen online at www.WNJC1360.com

Plus...
Free Tickets To Wizard World

Alex Simmons from Kids Con

The director of The NJ Marathon
Miss Pleasantville

Colleen Buckly from The Chelsea

and much more!

Z: Zounds, Zzzzzz, and Zebrafish

#atozchallenge - Z: Zounds is an awesome word indicating surprise or vexation. This book also lists - zoinks! which was used on Scooby Doo by Shaggy (awesome!). Then there's Zut Alors - an exclamation of disgust, scorn, or disappointment in French (when you say it, you should probably wave around an unfiltered cigarette - ha)
Z words deserve large font and exclamation points. Zebra - ha - too easy.
Zeal - Zeal without knowledge is Fire without Light - Thomas Fuller
Zen - yeah, find your own.

Final poison of the month - Zebrafish - Beautiful with vivid colors and elegant fins, this farflung fish (Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Red Sea) can cause respiratory distress and intense pain. Look but don't touch.

We've learned a lot this month about avoiding death by poisonous means. Basically you don't want to go to sleep - ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ - and not wake up. Good goal. Keep it in mind. Fortunately writing tends to keep us at our desks and away from deadly situation. Keep up the good work my friends.

jessica alba

jessica alba

Mailbox Monday for 4/30/12

Mailbox Monday is a weekly meme created by Marcia at A Girl and Her Books and is being hosted all this month by Cindy of Cindy's Love of Books.

I received a hardcover of The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones for an upcoming TLC Book Tour

I bought a trade paperback of Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter from Barnes & Noble.  This is a book I've wanted to read since high school, so I'm really looking forward to it.

   

On a trip to Wal-Mart I picked up a DVD of Disney's Beauty and the Beast since it's going back into the vault at the end of the month.  I also dug around the $5 music bin for a bit and found Don't Be Cruel by Bobby Brown (his second and best album) and Super Hits by New Kids On The Block.

Sunday Funnies

Behind the Scenes: Writer’s Log XVII

  Esta semana concentrei-me mais na versão inglesa de “A Vingança do Lobo” que está a correr bem, embora não a consigo rever ao ritmo que gostaria. Claro que depois li isto num entrevista a Peter V. Brett: “O meu objectivo é escrever mil palavras por dia” e fiquei a sentir-me muito melhor. Quer dizer, mil palavras por dia consigo na boinha, por isso já não estou mal.

  Um dos contributos para o ritmo mais lento, pelo menos esta semana, foi o facto de sábado ter sido dia de peregrinação à 82ª edição da Feira do Livro de Lisboa.

  A caçada foi boa, consegui trazer um belo saque de livros, nenhum dos quais a mais de 5 euros, e marcar mais uns quantos para o próximo safari. Sobre isso só tenho uma coisa a dizer: longa vida aos alfarrabistas!

  Deu também para estar com os bandidos do costume, assim como conhecer em carne e osso algumas pessoas que, tanto quanto sabia, podiam ser apenas programas informáticos.

Fecha de salida y tracklist de All I Was

El guitarrista de Alter Bridge y Creed, Mark Tremonti, ha anunciado públicamente la fecha de salida de su primer disco en solitario. El disco All I Was saldrá a la venta el 10 de julio a traves e Fret 12 Records, compañía creada por el propio Mark, Daniel Tremonti y Tom Stanley.
Como ya había publicado anteriormente, Mark se encargará de la guitarra y la composición, además de hacer su debut como vocalista principal. A su lado estará Eric Friedman (ex-Submersed, Creed) en la guitarra rítmica, bajo (en estudio) y coros, además de Garrett Whitlock (ex-Submersed) en la batería. En los directos, su compañero Brian Marshall (Creed, Alter Bridge) se encargará del bajo.
Antes de la publicación del álbum, su primer single "You Waste Your Time" estará disponible en unas semanas.
La lista de canciones de All I Was es la siguiente:

1. Leave It Alone
2. So You´re Afraid
3. Wish You Well
4. Brains
5. The Things I´ve Seen
6. You Waste Your Time
7. New Way Out
8. Giving Up
9. Proof
10. All I Was
11. Doesn´t Matter
12. Decay

Os dejo con un avance de 3 de las canciones que ya circula por Youtube:
 

NEXT SATURDAY's Offers Art, Music and Dancing!

Y: Yes, Young, Yertle the Turtle, Yard Sale, and Yellow Jasmine

#atozchallenge      Y: Yes   Let's cheer yes to acceptances. Let's play our Yes Greatest Hits Album. C'mon all you old rockers - Roundabout and I've Seen All Good People. Jon Andersen's voice could soar through an arena and Rick Wakeman could astound.  

Neil Young never does look happy. But that's fine because he's sending us messages and we need to listen to him. Ohio, Like a Hurricane, Heart of Gold. Whether he was with Crosby, Stills, and/or Nash or solo, Neil Young's voice was/is singular and poignant.

Youth is a perpetual intoxication, a fever of the brain - La Rochefoucauld

Yertle the Turtle - classic Dr.Seuss

Yard Sale - as applied to the world of skiiing, it's an oops. I heard the term at Jackson Hole Wyoming ( I was a tourist, not a skier), but was inspired to write a poem -
Teton Yard Sale
aerial tram glides
snowcaps beckon
moose tread below
eager laughter
diminishes
mutes
majestic silence
eyes survey ski slopes
sharp narrow paths
pinball forested run
sit, stand, jostle
ski pants swoosh
nervous preparation
buckle clink, velcro scratch
frankenstein boot step
cable car lurches upwards
downhill gondola passes
next level flows
steeper
peer down, plot course
spot crevasse chute
a body hurtles
poised
sharp
leaning
flails
poles javelin
skis askew
black gloved tree branch
goggles glitter
enclosed above
we point
yard sale below


skier retrieves a purple scarf

Finally - Yellow Jasmine - so pretty, so deadly. Then again, don't chew on pretty flowers. I know I've learned that lesson this month. Oh, and Yellow Jackets - try to not aggravate them or you'll be stung.

The Music And Entertainment Report! Monday's at 6pm on 1360 WNJC

Raymond Tyler The Heart and Soul of Atlantic CityInvites you to another great hour of radio Music and Entertainment!

This Week on The Music and Entertainment Report

Colleen Buckleyfrom The Chelsea Hotel in Atlantic City discusses the upcoming job fair at The Chelsea. More then 170 positions are available for the summer!

NJ Marathon race director Joe Gigas is on with info on Sunday’s big race.

www.FictionAndScience.comsponsors an exclusive interview with toy maker David Vonner who has designed some of the best Marvel Super Hero toys stops by to talk about the new Avengersmovie! Plus there will be an Avengers t-shirt give away to one lucky listener.

Vonner also will discuss Wizard World Philly as our annual Count Down To Wizard World Philly officially begins and Vonner and Tyler will talk about the upcoming second annual Fiction and Science Expo at The Shore Mall Columbus Day Weekend.Vonner was the guest of honor at last year’s event.  There will also be a pair of Wizard World Philly passes given to one lucky listener.

The newly crowned Miss Pleasantville Pageant winner Cierra Farquharson stops by to talk about last Saturday’s Pageant.

Plus we always take calls from our listeners. Listeners are encouraged to call in at 856-227-1360.

In the studio are producers Cheryl B. Sellers, author of the book Dignity Is a Choice and Barber Shop and Beauty Shop producer Elizabeth Rozier.

Long time sponsor Train Studios will offer one lucky listener one month of free personal training. www.TrainStudios.com

1360 WNJC AM is broadcast in South Jersey, Philadelphiaand Delaware.

Joey Jordison cumple 37 años

El batería de Slipknot cumplió ayer 37 años.
Nathan Jonas Jordison nació el 26 de abril de 1975 en Des Moines, Iowa. Entró a formar parte de Slipknot en 1995. También es guitarrista en el grupo Murderdolls. Ha colaborado en directo con varios grupos como KoRn, Metallica, Rob Zombie, Ministry, etc.
Durante su carrera ha sufrido varias lesiones, fruto de la inmadurez de sus compañeros, sobre todo por culpa del payaso Crahan.

X: Xanadu, X-Rated, and Xanax

#atozchallenge -                        X

Xanadu by Olivia Newton John and Jeff Lynne

A place where nobody dared to go
The love that we came to know

They call it Xanadu

(It takes your breath and it'll leave you blind)

Cheesy movie, but at least it gives us an X word. And yes, there's Xerox, X-ray, and Xylophone

X-Rated
from Roget's Thesaurus - racy, lewd, salacious, erotic, pornographic, adult, impure, obscene, smut, bawdy, filthy, blue.    What constitutes an x-rating? Justice Potter Stewart in an obscenity case said hard-core pornography is hard to define, but "I know it when I see it". He did go on in that case to defend the movie in question against further censorship. 

 Lolita and Lady Chatterly's Lover were considered pretty darn racy for their time and are still subject to censorship issues.

Like many drugs, Xanax, can be poisonous if overused and abused. Prescribed to relieve short term anxiety, it can be quite addictive

Maroon 5 breaks records in first week of "Payphone"

    With 493,00 downloads redorded by Nielsen SoundScan system, the partnership of Maroon 5 with the rapper Wiz Khalifa, Payphone (feat. Kimbra) of Gotye remains an additional week at the top.
    Payphone (feat. Wiz Khafila) also enters the digital music stopped in the first place, as did Makes Me Wonder in 2007. This time, however, gives the band the track record fordigital sales debut by group to hit the 465,000 dowloads of Boom Boom Pow, The Black Eyed Peas, released in 2009.
    The 493,000 song dowloads are also the eighth best mark weekly since 2003, when Nielsen SoundScan began couting digital sales. The record in this category is curretly held by Flo Rida, which sold 636,000 copies of Right Round in February 2009.
    The performance of Payphone (feat. Wiz Khalifa) was also notable on the radio. The track teached the 36th position, reaching 33 million listeners, a record for the particular band that had its best result in this ranking in 2004 with She Will Be Loved at the 49th position.
    With the new entry, the group of Adam Levine overcomes his highest debut on the charts, the partnership Moves Like Jagger (feat. Christina Aguilera) Christina Aguilera, who appeared on the list for the first time in eighth place in July 2001. Nine weeks later, the band would come first to the top, where he remained for four weeks.
    Payphone (feat. Wiz Khalifa) just missed out on the parade music on demand, which ranks the bands played on services controlled by the listener.

The end of the Texas trip, a new PA lifer, and some updates

Let's wrap up the excitement (that's now over two months old!) from Texas. After driving back in the rain to San Antonio, doing a serious car washing on the rental, and spending some quality time with the family, Gretchen, sister Mary, niece and junior birder Lilia, and I went to a couple of local SA lakes, Calaveras and Braunig, in search of Eared Grebes that had been seen during the previous weeks.

Here's what we saw:

 a sweet little Bufflehead about to dive

a beautiful Cinnamon Teal

 a little Killdeer digging a scrape for a nest

 a skulky Black-crowned Night Heron

tons of cute little Field Sparrows doing 

their bouncing ping-pong-ball calls

and YES! Our first Eared Grebe!

What a thrill! We ended up the Texas trip with a ridiculous number of lifers, even for me on my third trip down. I now have a whopping 336 lifebirds, if you count this little gem we saw a couple of weeks ago here in PA:

 Rusty Blackbirds! Not a great photo. 

How about this one?

Female Rusty Blackbirds! The neat thing about these birds was how easy it was to tell them apart from the Red-winged Blackbirds. Gretchen and I had debated several times about whether we'd able to spot a rusty among a flock of red-wings. Their size and coloring, however, made it obvious: they were almost blue, and the ones that hadn't quite finished their molting had little brown feathers mixed in, just like in the field guides.

To catch you up on recent events, AB and I celebrated our third year together by taking a trip to the Finger Lakes. We saw Taughannock Falls:

and hiked around the gorges, and we doodled in some great locally owned small bookstores and antique stores around Trumansburg, Ithaca, and Interlaken. We pretty much lived it up!

We're also getting to the specific planning -- choosing last workday dates, planning our trip to California to pick up the rest of my belongings, and looking for jobs in Maine and Massachusetts. Yes, folks, we're moving on! AB and I are both pretty tired of this little burg and its undergrad-drinking focus; we'll be leaving in August.

Where we'll go, nobody knows.

Well, actually, it'll be somewhere in Maine (probably Portland?) or Massachusetts (not in Boston - too expensive - but nearby).

Bret Michaels will Rock the Trop September 21st

SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN

Poison’s Bret  Michaels will give you “Something to Believe In” when he takes the stage at the  Tropicana Showroom Friday, September 21st at 9 p.m.

Michaels works hard, but rocks harder.  With more than  25 million albums sold, 15 Top 40 hits, a long-standing position as spokesman  for the American Diabetes Association (ADA), and the title of “Celebrity  Apprentice: Season 3” winner under his belt, it seems he has seen and done it  all. 


Michaels began his career as the front man for the legendary  rock band Poison.  Together, they cranked out chart-busting hits such as  “Talk Dirty to Me,” “Something to Believe in,” “Nothing But a Good Time,” and  “Every Rose has its Thorn.” He currently has four solo albums and tours with  the Bret Michaels Band.  


After 25 years in the music industry, Michaels’ career  launched to new levels when his reality TV series “Rock of Love” had three  record-breaking seasons, making it one of the most successful in VH1’s  history.  The series followed Michaels on his quest to find love.   Soon after, he astounded audiences when he won the title of Trump’s  “Celebrity Apprentice” in 2010.  He has been involved with many other  television projects since, including “Bret Michaels: Life as I know it”, “Don’t  Forget the Lyrics”, and “The Bret Michaels True Hollywood Story.”


In  addition to his work in television, touring, and philanthropy, Michaels will  also be releasing a new solo album titled “Get Your Rock On,” on June 12,  2012.  Michaels will, moreover, be releasing a new line with Pet Smart,  The Bret Michaels: Pets Rock Collection on June 17th.


It doesn’t stop there.  When the lights are dim on  stage and on set, Michaels serves as the spokesperson for National Diabetes  month and has even been awarded for his efforts in raising awareness and funds  for the ADA.


Tickets for Bret Michaels at Tropicana Casino & Resort  on September 21st at 9 p.m. Tickets are currently on sale and priced  at $75 and $85.  Tickets can be purchased at the Tropicana Box Office, by  calling Ticketmaster at 1-800-745-3000 or online at www.ticketmaster.com.  For more  information and other tour dates visit www.bretmichaels.com

Poderes psíquicos: kything

  Um dos meus favoritos, embora ainda não o tenha usado em nenhuma personagem. So far…

 Kything consiste numa ligação telepática remota entre duas ou mais pessoas, normalmente irmãos, que lhes permite transmitir pensamentos e emoções um ao outro, independentemente da distância. 

  Entre outros conteúdos em que foi utilizado, os fãs da ficção história céltica reconhecê-lo-ão da saga de Juliet Marillier, Sevenwaters, embora o termo nunca seja usado nos livros. 

W: Wyeths, Wrigley, Whimsy, and Wasps

 #atozchallenge   W: Wyeths - I grew up near Brandywine, PA and the art of the Wyeths is in my soul.  The grandfather Nathaniel Wyeth illustrated tomes. Andrew Wyeth painted Christina's World, windows, fields, and barns. We always joke that my family loves bleak and gray. Yep, the Wyeth palette seeped into our blood.

 Jamie Wyeth continued in his father's path with landscapes, pigs, and he also did portraits such as Warhol. The Brandywine area is gorgeous. Visit the battlefield and also the Wyeth museum and grounds. The area reeks of history, nature, and art.

Wrigley Field is part of the Holy Grail for baseball fans. Ray and I visited Chicago and attended an afternoon game. Wow!!!! The ivy wall, the buzz of Cubs fans, and the intimate baseball field is awesome. This is baseball at its best.

Whimsy -  by Joanne Faries
The Bright Spot

Black shoes, blue jeans, gray sky
polka dots a conscious choice
pajama soft, the socks’
white and yellow spots
dance under cuff
touch of whimsy perk
this dreary afternoon


Wasps - Ray's allergic, so we always have Raid Wasp Killer at the ready. Wasps are incredibly lethal with their vicious stinger. Quite scary because reaction time is within an hour.